Shame Active

Jesus tells Peter that Peter is blessed by receiving the divinely-bestowed awareness that Jesus is "the Messiah, the Son of the Living God."  Of course, according to the Gospel of John, certain disciples of Jesus had long entertained the possibility of him being the Messiah.  There is even the amazing phenomenon in the gospels of demons shouting, "I know who you are, the Holy One of God," and the like.  Given that Jesus is described as ordering the demons to be silent, there exists of course the conjecture that only Jesus hears such exclamations--though the text does not assert such possibilities.

Since Peter, after his oft-quoted proclamation of Jesus' messiahship, is rebuked by Jesus as being "Satan" for attempting to dissuade Jesus from the martyrdom of that same messiahship, it is asserted often by interpreters that Peter has failed to "understand" the fate of the Scripture-predicted Messiah--although the supposedly signal implications of the "Satan" episode would seem to be overblown in retrospect, since apparently nobody "understood" the tragic Scripture-fulfillment they witnessed at the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Of course, it would be simpler to assert, in regards to the "Get thee behind me, Satan" episode, that contradicting the Messiah of God is just not the thing to do in any event.  I contend that the most reasonable interpretation of the close proximity of Peter's proclamation to his rebuke by Jesus is found in phenomena known to all of us--Peter was bewildered and Peter was agitated.  This is, after all, the Peter who is reduced to babbling at the Transfiguration.  One of the unfortunate aspects of conventional Christian preaching is the sloppy combination of the supposed "simple, down-to-earth" nature of the Gospels switched whenever convenient with the Gospels treated as symbolic tapestries of Great Ideas in combination or contrast.

The Gospels presume that they are written for human beings living in the world.  When we see human beings in the Gospels under stress--and Jesus himself goes about arranging purposely respites (rare, indeed) for himself and his followers--then we are warranted in treating them as human beings under stress.  The people in the Gospels are people in the world (and it is telling indeed that so much of modern preaching fixates on "the world" or "the culture" of today as though it were some sort of Behemoth-ideation against which the self-conceits of believers as "saints" might be contrasted.)  People in the world are confused, and much of what confuses them are ideas they collect from they-know-not-where.

Peter is hit with an idea from above, and he juggles it, and he fumbles it, and presumably he picks it up again.  That is how inspiration works--we are hit with ideas that surprise and burgeon and blossom and lead to so may things--all before we have come to grasp truly the initial ideas, and we might for the rest of our days second-guess and perhaps refine those initial understandings.  This is the messy reality of trying to understand our existence, but religion as a socialized and internalized phenomenon--and as a socialized-into-internalizing-it phenomenon--relies on a binary yes-or-no conceit of ostensibly packageable belief, typified in Christianity by the supposed "saving faith" as opposed to that which is merely sentimental or intellectual or whatever.

And so the great question about the teachings of Jesus is whether we are going to understand those teachings as concerned with our formulating thoughts and taking actions so as to be on the right side of conceptual divides, or as concerned with our formulating thoughts and taking actions so as to press toward and against absolutes that we might never comprehend or adjoin.  The whole idea that we could ever "understand" or "believe" the teachings of Jesus is an idea that can claim no more than indifferent warrant in the Gospels--as neither can claim the idea that "understanding" or "believing" in humanly-relatable terms is the point of the Gospels in any event.  The Gospel of John begins with Jesus amused by the first disciples' notions of belief, and it ends with Jesus regarding as merely tenuous the disciples' assertion that they believe at last--and so we are left with the all-too-understandable implication that bewilderment and frustration are the paving-stones of the true and narrow way.

Nothing illustrates better the unnecessary predicament of the conventional interpreters than the story of the Good Thief.  By any notion of the usual expectations, the Good Thief (who apparently had begun with hurling abuse as vigorously as his unrepentant compatriot) has before the end either recalled a sufficient "saving faith" idea-store about Jesus (making him no different from any other pre-Crucifixion believer and making his story therefore mere adornment), or he has been granted an un-reproduceable revelation (making his description of the logic-train of his settling on a view of Jesus as innocent into an irrelevance.)  This is what happens when we view the teachings of Jesus as being about our needing to be on the right side of this or that divide.

This blog must be about the necessity of viewing the teachings of Jesus in terms of shame.  In the Christian world today there is much talk of guilt and humiliation.  Of course Jesus bore our guilt and suffered humiliation, but Christianity does not seem to know what to do with shame--even though it is understood that Jesus is not beyond lamenting that he will suffer shame in each and every case in which people are ashamed of him and of his teaching.  Is not shame, rather than either guilt or humiliation, the final redoubt of resistance to the call of God?  The world is full of "believers" of diverse faiths who will proclaim loudly how guilty they are--and have been--of sin, and is full of such people who will assume postures of humiliation.  Guilt, however, is relative, and no matter how many sins are the cause of guilt, they are finite.  Humiliation, involving placing oneself lower and lower and perhaps lower in the eyes of the world, relies nonetheless on "achieving" such a low place in the context of one's surroundings.

"Shame," by contrast, possesses no scale or context, when it is understood that one is ashamed before the Creator--and it is in terms of shame that the proper terms of God's mercy are found.  God forgives sins by blotting out their number, and God forgives for the sake of humility--but this is all contextual.  The real cry for mercy comes from the creature in acknowledged shame before the Creator.  Nothing suits more tellingly Jesus' expectation of his followers than his expectation, not that they be perfect persons, but that they be perfect even as is God.  Only on these terms can we attempt to understand the abject quality of our shame.

The Good Thief was expiating his guilt on the cross of his torment.  The Good Thief was humiliating himself by calling out to Jesus.  Both of those things were necessary for his salvation, but they differed in no eternal implication from the Jewish leaders' approach to the Baptist at the Jordan--and the Baptist confronted them with their unaddressed shame, which made their gesture futile.  (John the Baptist also asked them where they got the idea they needed to attend to their souls--one wonders how that source of their awakening understanding differed from the source of Peter's "Messiah" revelation.)

In short, the active element of the Good Thief's episode was not guilt or humiliation, but rather shame.  For all human beings, mercy from God is ever required, and ever required in every respect--because we are not God.  Not merely because we are not as righteous as God, nor merely because God Incarnate was willing to suffer the greatest of humiliations--but simply because we are not God.  The Good Thief feared God, and was ashamed.  Jesus welcomed him into heaven--welcomed a person (like us) whose sins could never be perfectly self-prosecuted, welcomed a person whose humility was not humble enough to refrain from asking for a favor, welcomed a person who was ashamed.